exporting

The best intentions during an election campaign have a habit of twisting beyond recognition once a candidate is in power. I doubt when Barack Obama was teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago he thought that, once in the White House, his Administration would be responsible for one of the most chilling crackdowns on the freedom of the press in recent American history. And yet, after the revelation of the Department of Justice’s wide-ranging move to seize phone records of Associated Press reporters and a deeply disturbing investigation of the Fox News reporter James Rosen — seriously, read this — Obama’s legacy has been permanently altered. I also doubt that the candidate who in 2008 ran on a cap-and-trade plan and promised to make climate change a top priority thought he would go down as the driller in chief. And yet — without taking anything away from Obama’s very real accomplishments in supporting renewable energy and efficiency — that’s exactly what’s happening. Domestic oil and natural gas production have boomed under Obama’s watch, and even though he was hardly the cause (most of the new fracking is happening on private land largely outside federal regulation), neither had Obama done much to stand in the way, at least according to his increasingly frustrated environmental allies. Greens want Obama to stop the proposed Keystone pipeline and halt the expansion of fracked oil and natural gas, but as Obama begins his second term in earnest, that seems unlikely. (MORE: Why the Shale-Gas Industry Needs Regulations for Fracking) Take natural gas. For some time, gas companies have been pushing the federal government to make it easier to export natural gas in liquefied form to foreign countries. This is itself a huge turnaround. Less than a decade ago, domestic production of natural gas was so low that facilities were being built in U.S. ports to import foreign natural gas. The shale-gas revolution, made possible by fracking, changed all that. Now the U.S. literally has more natural gas than it knows what to do with, and the